This article is cross-posted from Al-Akhbar.com with permission from the author Max Blumenthal

New York – In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.

Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park is just the latest example of the so-called War on Terror creeping into every day life. Revelations like these have raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics are being used to suppress the Occupy movement.

The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception.

“Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We’re in a global war.”

Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security and a leading expert on terror and civil liberties, said the Israeli influence on American law enforcement is so extensive it has bled into street-level police conduct. “After 9/11 we reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those fronts was torture,” Greenberg told me. “The training in Iraq and Afghanistan on torture was Israeli training. There’s been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and now we’re going to spread that into the fabric of everyday American life? It’s counter-terrorism creep. And it’s exactly what you could have predicted would have happened.”

Changing the way we do business

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is at the heart of American-Israeli law enforcement collaboration. JINSA is a Jerusalem and Washington DC-based think tank known for stridently neoconservative policy positions on Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians and its brinkmanship with Iran. The group’s board of directors boasts a Who’s Who of neocon ideologues. Two former JINSA advisors who have also consulted for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, went on to serve in the Department of Defense under President George W. Bush, playing influential roles in the push to invade and occupy Iraq.

Through its Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP), JINSA claims to have arranged Israeli-led training sessions for over 9000 American law enforcement officials at the federal, state and municipal level. “The Israelis changed the way we do business regarding homeland security in New Jersey,” Richard Fuentes, the NJ State Police Superintendent, said after attending a 2004 JINSA-sponsored Israel trip and a subsequent JINSA conference alongside 435 other law enforcement officers.

During a 2004 LEEP trip, JINSA brought 14 senior American law enforcement officials to Israel to receive instruction from their counterparts. The Americans were trained in “how to secure large venues, such as shopping malls, sporting events and concerts,” JINSA’s website reported. Escorted by Brigadier General Simon Perry, an Israeli police attaché and former Mossad official, the group toured the Israeli separation wall, now a mandatory stop for American cops on junkets to Israel. “American officials learned about the mindset of a suicide bomber and how to spot trouble signs,” according to JINSA. And they were schooled in Israeli killing methods. “Although the police are typically told to aim for the chest when shooting because it is the largest target, the Israelis are teaching [American] officers to aim for a suspect’s head so as not to detonate any explosives that might be strapped to his torso,” the New York Times reported.

Cathy Lanier, now the Chief of Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, was among the law enforcement officials junketed to Israel by JINSA. “I was with the bomb units and the SWAT team and all of those high profile specialized [Israeli] units and I learned a tremendous amount,” Lanier reflected. “I took 82 pages of notes while I was there which I later brought back and used to formulate a lot of what I later used to create and formulate the Homeland Security terrorism bureau in the DC Metropolitan Police department.”

Some of the police chiefs who have taken part in JINSA’s LEEP program have done so under the auspices of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a private non-governmental group with close ties to the Department of Homeland Security. Chuck Wexler, the executive director of PERF, was so enthusiastic about the program that by 2005 he had begun organizing trips to Israel sponsored by PERF, bringing numerous high-level American police officials to receive instruction from their Israeli counterparts.

PERF gained notoriety when Wexler confirmed that his group coordinated police raids in 16 cities across America against “Occupy” protest encampments. As many as 40 cities have sought PERF advice on suppressing the “Occupy” movement and other mass protest activities. Wexler did not respond to my requests for an interview.

Lessons from Israel to Auschwitz

Besides JINSA, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has positioned itself as an important liaison between American police forces and the Israeli security-intelligence apparatus. Though the ADL promotes itself as a Jewish civil rights group, it has provoked controversy by publishing a blacklist of organizations supporting Palestinian rights, and for condemning a proposal to construct an Islamic community center in downtown New York, several blocks from Ground Zero, on the basis that some opponents of the project were entitled to “positions that others would characterize as irrational or bigoted.”

Through the ADL’s Advanced Training School course on Extremist and Terrorist Threats, over 700 law enforcement personnel from 220 federal and local agencies including the FBI and CIA have been trained by Israeli police and intelligence commanders. This year, the ADL brought 15 high-level American police officials to Israel for instruction from the country’s security apparatus. According to the ADL, over 115 federal, state and local law enforcement executives have undergone ADL-organized training sessions in Israel since the program began in 2003. “I can honestly say that the training offered by ADL is by far the most useful and current training course I have ever attended,” Deputy Commissioner Thomas Wright of the Philadelphia Police Department commented after completing an ADL program this year. The ADL’s relationship with the Washington DC Police Department is so cozy its members are invited to accompany DC cops on “ride along” patrols.

The ADL claims to have trained over 45,000 American law enforcement officials through its Law Enforcement and Society program, which “draws on the history of the Holocaust to provide law enforcement professionals with an increased understanding of…their role as protectors of the Constitution,” the group’s website stated. All new FBI agents and intelligence analysts are required to attend the ADL program, which is incorporated into three FBI training programs. According to officialFBI recruitment material, “all new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”

Fighting “crimiterror”

Among the most prominent Israeli government figure to have influenced the practices of American law enforcement officials is Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service and current member of Knesset who recently introduced legislation widely criticized as anti-democratic. During the Second Intifada, Dichter ordered several bombings on densely populated Palestinian civilian areas, including one on the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza that resulted in the death of 15 innocent people, including 8 children, and 150 injuries. “After each success, the only thought is, ‘Okay, who’s next?’” Dichter said of the “targeted” assassinations he has ordered.

Despite his dubious human rights record and apparently dim view of democratic values, or perhaps because of them, Dichter has been a key figure in fostering cooperation between Israeli security forces and American law enforcement. In 2006, while Dichter was serving at the time as Israel’s Minister of Public Security, he spoke in Boston, Massachusetts before the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Seated beside FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Dichter told the 10,000 police officers in the crowd that there was an “intimate connection between fighting criminals and fighting terrorists.” Dichter declared that American cops were actually “fighting crimiterrorists.” The Jerusalem Post reported that Dichter was “greeted by a hail of applause, as he was hugged by Mueller, who described Dichter as his mentor in anti-terror tactics.”

A year after Dichter’s speech, he and then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff signed a joint memorandum pledging security collaboration between America and Israel on issues ranging from airport security to emergency planning. In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano authorized a new joint memorandum with Israeli Transport and Road Safety Minister Israel Katz shoring up cooperation between the US Transportation Security Agency – the agency in charge of day-to-day airport security – and Israel’s Security Department. The recent joint memorandum also consolidated the presence of US Homeland Security law enforcement personnel on Israeli soil. “The bond between the United States and Israel has never been stronger,” Napolitano remarked at a recent summit of AIPAC, the leading outfit of America’s Israel lobby, in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The Demographic Unit

For the New York Police Department, collaboration with Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus became a top priority after 9/11. Just months after the attacks on New York City, the NYPD assigned a permanent, taxpayer-funded liaison officerto Tel Aviv. Under the leadership of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, ties between the NYPD and Israel have deepened by the day. Kelly embarked on his first trip to Israel in early 2009 to demonstrate his support for Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, a one-sided attack that left over 1400 Gaza residents dead in three weeks and led a United Nations fact-finding mission to conclude that Israeli military and government officials had committed war crimes.

Kelly returned to Israel the following year to speak at the Herziliya Conference, an annual gathering of neoconservative security and government officials who obsess over supposed “demographic threats.” After Kelly appeared on stage, the Herziliya crowd was addressed by the pro-Israel academic Martin Kramer, who claimed that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was helping to reduce the numbers of “superfluous young men of fighting age.” Kramer added, “If a state can’t control these young men, then someone else will.”

Back in New York, the NYPD set up a secret “Demographics Unit” designed to spy on and monitor Muslim communities around the city. The unit was developed with input and intensive involvement by the CIA, which still refuses to name the former Middle East station chief it has posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division. Since 2002, the NYPD has dispatched undercover agents known as “rakers” and “mosque crawlers” into Pakistani-American bookstores and restaurants to gauge community anger over US drone strikes inside Pakistan, and into Palestinian hookah bars and mosques to search out signs of terror recruitment and clandestine funding. “If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn,” the Associated Press reported. “The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny.”

The Israeli imprimatur on the NYPD’s Demographics Unit is unmistakable. As a former police official told the Associated Press, the Demographics Unit has attempted to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.”

Shop ‘til you’re stopped

At Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, security personnel target non-Jewish and non-white passengers, especially Arabs, as a matter of policy. The most routinely harassed passengers are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who must brace themselvesfor five-hour interrogation sessions and strip searches before flying. Those singled out for extra screening by Shin Bet officers are sent to what many Palestinians from Israel call the “Arab room,” where they are subjected to humiliating questioning sessions (former White House Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala encountered such mistreatment during a visit to Israel last year). Some Palestinians are forbidden from speaking to anyone until takeoff, and may be menaced by Israeli flight attendants during the flight. In one documented case, a six-month-old was awoken for a strip search by Israeli Shin Bet personnel. Instances of discrimination against Arabs at Ben Gurion International are too numerous to detail – several incidents occur each day – but a few of the more egregious instances were outlined in a 2007 petition the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed with the country’s Supreme Court.

Though the Israeli system of airline security contains dubious benefits and clearly deleterious implications for civil liberties, it is quietly and rapidly migrating into major American airports. Security personnel at Boston’s Logan International Airport have undergone extensive training from Israeli intelligence personnel, learning to apply profiling and behavioral assessment techniques against American citizens that were initially tested on Palestinians. The new procedures began in August, when so-called Behavior Detection Officers were placed in security queues at Logan’s heavily trafficked Terminal A. Though the procedures have added to traveler stress while netting exactly zero terrorists, they are likely to spread to other cities. “I would like to see a lot more profiling” in American airports, said Yossi Sheffi, an Israeli-born risk analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Israeli techniques now dictate security procedures at the Mall of America, a gargantuan shopping mall in Bloomington, Minnesota that has become a major tourist attraction. The new methods took hold in 2005 when the mall hired a former Israeli army sergeant named Mike Rozin to lead a special new security unit. Rozin, who once worked with a canine unit at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, instructed his employees at the Mall of America to visually profile every shopper, examining their expressions for suspicious signs. His security team accosts and interrogates an average of 1200 shoppers a year, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

One of the thousands who fell into Rozin’s dragnet was Najam Qureshi, a Pakistani-American mall vendor whose father accidentally left his cell phone on a table in the mall food court. A day after the incident, FBI agents appeared at Qureshi’s doorstep to ask if he knew anyone seeking to harm the United States. An army veteran interrogated for two hours by Rozin’s men for taking video inside the mall sobbed openly about his experience to reporters. Meanwhile, another man, Emile Khalil, was visited by FBI agents after mall security stopped him for taking photographs of the dazzling consumer haven.

“I think that the threat of terrorism in the United States is going to become an unfortunate part of American life,” Rozin remarked to American Jewish World. And as long as the threat persists in the public’s mind, Israeli securitocrats like Rozin will never have to worry about the next paycheck.

“Occupy” meets the Occupation

When a riot squad from the New York Police Department destroyed and evicted the “Occupy Wall Street” protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, department leadership drew on the anti-terror tactics they had refined since the 9/11 attacks. According to the New York Times, the NYPD deployed “counterterrorism measures” to mobilize large numbers of cops for the lightning raid on Zuccotti. The use of anti-terror techniques to suppress a civilian protest complemented harsh police measures demonstrated across the country against the nationwide “Occupy” movement, from firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into unarmed crowds to blasting demonstrators with the LRAD sound cannon.

Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much it will inform police repression of future upsurges of street protest. But already, the Israelification of American law enforcement appears to have intensified police hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, common criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists.”

“After 9/11 we had to react very quickly,” Greenberg remarked, “but now we’re in 2011 and we’re not talking about people who want to fly planes into buildings. We’re talking about young American citizens who feel that their birthright has been sold. If we’re using Israeli style tactics on them and this stuff bleeds into the way we do business at large, were in big trouble.”

This article is cross-posted from Al-Akhbar.com with permission from the author Max Blumenthal.

You can read more of Max Blumenthal at MaxBlumenthal.com. He is the author of Republican Gomorrah, published by Nation Books.

63 Comments

• 1. Soj  |  December 2nd, 2011 at 9:36 pm

  Just reading this makes me wince. What kind of world is this?

• 2. EL BARTO  |  December 2nd, 2011 at 9:40 pm

  My favorite part of the article:

  According to official FBI recruitment material, “all new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”

  expanded racist state security would’ve prevented the holocaust!

• 3. helplesscase  |  December 2nd, 2011 at 10:27 pm

  Fantastic article. This is all part of the end-run of neoliberalism: staggering debt, no protections, no meaningful participation in government, and the only thing that gets money is the ever-expanding military-industrial-security-prison-predator drone complex.

• 4. gc  |  December 2nd, 2011 at 11:43 pm

  First thing I thought of while reading this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cobbett#Prison:_1810.E2.80.931812

  Another example of an empire hiring the agents of a client state to train its own forces, resulting in abuses being inflicted on that empire’s own citizens. (Though back in 1810 the foreign agents did the abusing themselves.)

  Well, the neocons always said we should become more like the British empire!

• 5. G.A.  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 3:56 am

  The way private organizations like ADL are beginning to heavily influence state institutions is enough to make one squirm. Even if they’re having good intentions it’s setting a nasty precedent, and it’s just trouble brewing.

• 6. G.A.  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 3:57 am

  Great article, by the way. Really enjoyed it.

• 7. DeeboCools  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 7:37 am

  I normally avoid all the talk of US/Israel/Palestine because the debate is always full of emotion on both sides that I have no stake in. But let me try to follow the story as it is…

  The US gives aid, weaponry and preferential treatment to Israel on the premise that Israel is the only democracy in the middle east and harbors human rights and liberty. When Israel attacks Palestinians, or it’s own people and is called out on it, it pretends that human rights abuses are actually acts of self-defense of its right to statehood.

  Pro-Israel Americans claim that if you don’t support Israels “self defense” that you are threatening it’s existence- making yourself an Anti-zionist, and Anti-zionism is Anti-Jew. Even if you, the Anti-zionist are yourself a jew or jewish-american, you are simply attacked as a “self-hating Jew.”

  Is there no way to be an anti-zionist in America without being called a racist? Hell, I’m more than that, I’m anti-Israel. They are bad people whose relationship with America, my country, is toxic and deleterious. I don’t consider “jew” an ethnicity really(ooooh does that make me a Nazi, anti-zionist, or ordinary bigot? take your pick)

  The same is true with our relationship with Saudi Arabia and other regressive regimes- the difference here is that Saudi’s aren’t coming onto our land and training our own police officers on our dime.

  When former marines drawn from the poorest sections of America are protesting financial crime and inequality after having fought for wall street and Israel’s interests, and then are fired upon by paramilitary weaponry by police officers who’ve been trained by Israel, I have to take it personally.

  The United States and Israel are guilty of crimes against the Palestinians, the Israelis, and ordinary Americans.

  “Fucking Nazis. Nothing ever changes.”- Walter Sobchak

• 8. William  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 8:15 am

  This should be a must-read for all US citizens.

• 9. John  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 12:42 pm

  …According to official FBI recruitment material, “all new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”…

  …and then they start practicing their Gestapo methods… LOL.

  What’s with the Jews anyway? They did it to us in WW2, now we gonna do it to YOU ALL! We have every moral right!

  Fuck that.

• 10. Zhu Bajie  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 2:11 pm

  Doesn’t the Holocaust Memorial show FBI men what they can do TO people?

  Is there an American Indian Holocaust Memorial somewhere in DC?

• 11. John  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 2:38 pm

  American Indian Holocaust?

  They couldn’t get rights. Holocaust™ was registered first by Israel Inc.

• 12. Loonesta  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 3:08 pm

  The word “holocaust” is a Roman word which means “furnace”, and this may explain its significance in the context of the inhumanly horrific and abusive treatment of Jews (and others) by Hitler & Co. during WWII. You really can’t have a holocaust w/out some burning in there some place. Overuse makes the word into utter nonsense and depreciates the memory of its tragic association w/ an almost-genocided people.

• 13. Mudplanet  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 4:53 pm

  “Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,”

  should read “the Harvard of state terrorism,”

• 14. G.A.  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 5:25 pm

  @ 10.

  You know, in holocaust a population usually decreases. Sadly, in a time of trollery the intelligence level definitely decreases 10-fold, as for example the intelligence of an intestinal-troll such as myself who’d make some stupid fucking comment thinking it would get past the Almighty Exiled Censor. How foolish I was–no, stupid is the word. Thank you for improving my comment, Exiled.

• 15. enzian  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 5:39 pm

  “Overuse makes the word into utter nonsense and depreciates the memory of its tragic association w/ an almost-genocided people”

  so, you’re agreeing here that what happened to the american Indians is a holocaust then?

  i know, it’s a bullshit semantic argument, but the fact is, the holocaust has been taken over (was in some sense created, shaped as a concept) by folks like the ADL who put shrines, excuse me, museums in major cities and then insist that only Jews be represented – compare this to, say, modern day Dachau, where the Germans take pains to represent all of the victims. the holocaust is one of israel’s main political arguments, a sort of nonsensical plea that if they didn’t have their own little apartheid state they’d be in that position all over again.

  which incidentally is one reason israelis have a complicated relationship with america – there’s not really supposed to be a place where Jews are widely integrated and successful as a diaspora group; it doesn’t fit into the zionist worldview. and yet here it is, preventing israel’s total economic collapse year after year.

• 16. Rehmat  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 6:04 pm

  LOL – The anti-Iran government of David Cameron was is satisfied with the capability of UK’s own secret service (MI5) and has invited Israeli Mossad to train MI5 operatives. Israeli daily, YNet had reported on May 12, 2011 that Mossad officials participated in a security drill at London’s Olympics park. The drill stimulated a scenario based on 1972 Munich Olympics, where atheletes were held hostages by (Palestinian) terrorists. The Munich hostage-taking was BEEEEEPP!!! GREETINGS EARTHLINGS, I MEAN YOUR COMMENTS SECTION MUCH HARM. BEEEEEPPP!!

• 17. az  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 6:11 pm

  It’s a War of Terror.

• 18. az  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 6:33 pm

  @Loonesta. Thank you. All the zionism-related comments are kind of discomforting. At this point, the whole thing with Israel is that the US sponsors its military-industrial complex, which builds settlements out in the West Bank, where people pay a fraction of the taxes they would pay in Israel proper. As a result, Israel loses tax revenue while increasing military expenditures, which is what their protests earlier this year were all about. This whole arrangement doesn’t really benefit anyone unless you’re a politician in Israel/America, a defense contractor, or one of those religious/political (Zionist?) nuts who get off on Israeli expansion and subjugation of other people. (In the last case, it doesn’t actually benefit you but at least you get off on it.)

• 19. super390  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 7:55 pm

  When Israel moved rightward, it suddenly ceased to be the extrusion of hated Jew-socialism that the US right despised. It became the White Army That Does Anything To Win, unlike those pansy Pentagon losers in ‘Nam. It became the Great White Hope.

  So just as right-wingers believed (honestly, look at their agitprop) that the human race is infested with poor inferiors who irrationally hate the truly productive Western man who is the only force for good, the Zionists hitched that onto the belief that the world is full of jealous lazy anti-Semites who irrationally hate “entrepreneurial” Jews. The former defines the sacred duty of the right-wing fantasy government: to protect property owners and their special privileges at all costs. Now this irrational, murderous protection has been extended to Jews by a massive lobbying effort that practically merges Israel and capitalism as a single indivisible Good. Zionist expansionism is the last-gasp proof that Anglo-American greedism will still triumph over the mud races. Conversely, crime (against property) and terrorism (against Israel and America) thus really are one single attack by the inferiors against the Master Race.

  That special murderous gleam that comes into the eyes of cops, Klansmen and Afrikaners when attacking certain groups is the flame of tribal identity. To say that the Holocaust is really not that damn unusual in a world full of genocide has become as much an attack on that identity as saying that our military isn’t really fighting for our best interests or that Christians ought to be pacifists who give away stuff instead of conquering or that our bosses will pollute us all to death for a few extra pennies.

  My congratulations to the Israel Lobby for this genetic re-engineering of the redneck mentality to turn Israel into a sacred extension of America, Christianity and free enterprise that must be defended at all costs and probably will be in the near future. Too bad that Israel, with its Orwell-ware economy and real estate bubble and police state normalization, has acted as a prototype for all the worst the Israeli/American neocon sect is now sucessfully enacting in the US. Now that our countries are indistinguishable right down to the protest movements being attacked by the same training manuals, Netanyahu’s closing of opposition media, his Jim Crow moves against Israeli Arabs, his ethno-front’s ads telling Israelis living in the US that their kids won’t “really be Jews” because their liberal Jew spouses contaminated them, and his party’s cultivation of US Christian extremists as potential reinforcements in the illegal settlements all point to things we will see soon in the US.

• 20. Rehmat  |  December 3rd, 2011 at 8:28 pm

  az -the Zionist regime doesn’t care for the taxes as it gets $3 billion military aid from the US which is 25% of its total annual budget ($12 billion vs Iran’s $6 billion).

  interestingly, ABC’s Ben Knight believes that Israel is doomed by religious Jews who hate to be part of work force and not that much from rise in the population of native Muslims and Christians …..

  THIS IS NOT A SPACE FOR ANTISEMITIC LINKS FUCKWAD

• 21. Stu Daniel Jackson  |  December 4th, 2011 at 6:34 am

  Max I would like to say how refreshing it is to see open and honest criticism of ones own homeland forces! So many times does the truth get obscured by pride and prejudice! I also believe you may be the man to bring this age old battle of race and persecution not to an end but a workable light so guilt, fear and hate can be swept to the side and real issues tackled! Thank you for having the guts to show your soul’

• 22. Hanspy  |  December 4th, 2011 at 8:19 am

  “After 9/11 we had to react very quickly,” Greenberg remarked, “but now we’re in 2011 and we’re not talking about people who want to fly planes into buildings. We’re talking about young American citizens who feel that their birthright has been sold. quote Greenberg

  So, he is afraid for those? Why is he? Is the USA not taking there birthrights away?
  When do those man learn that with starting to beat up there own ppl, there wil come a time the ppl wil beat up you. And whan i see police officer/s beating up MY kid in a peacefull protest what is alowed. i wil go after those . Even when it wil kill me. Thats the way terrorist are born. And that is a thing leaders seem to forget.

• 23. Gatorade  |  December 4th, 2011 at 8:28 am

  God damn that’s fucked up. I was never really surprised through all of the terrible security revelations, like torture, yeah I figured they’d do that, nsa spying on americans, sure open secret whatever. But this is so fucked, god damn

• 24. az  |  December 4th, 2011 at 8:52 am

  $3 billion really isn’t a lot of money, considering the intensive nature of the IDF. For example, the US military budget for 2012 has a low-ball figure of $1 trillion. That’s 83 times what you say Israel’s total budget is, for a country that has a population that is approximately 60 times smaller. That’s beside the point though, which is that outward expansion doesn’t benefit Israel in any way, as it’s a drain on resources that doesn’t bring back any substantial benefits. The point I’m making here is that it’s basically a sociopath state by the way it’s laid out, because despite a lot of lobbying for aid, the only benefactors in Israel are politicians, defense contractors, and religious/political assholes all of whomever are sociopaths. I guess it’s gotten to the point where it doesn’t really help America either, just a stupid self-perpetuating process of money being thrown into a fire, but what can you do eh.

• 25. Sean the Sorcerer  |  December 4th, 2011 at 1:01 pm

  The Fuhrer (peace be upon him) will no doubt roll in his grave at this, but since the Israelis seem to be the only paler-hued tribe left on the planet that is willing to stand up to the savage dark hordes and carve out more territory for their people, I think it’s time we granted them, like the Japanese before them, the status of “honorary Aryans.”

• 26. Zhu Bajie  |  December 4th, 2011 at 2:10 pm

  You know, 100 years ago, the entire Middle East was one country, the Ottoman Empire. It had lots of problems but it had some virtues. Most of the current problems in the Middle East step from the partition. I strongly suspect Churchill, Balfour, et al., founded Israel because they wanted Western Jews to be their middlemen, like Indians in Africa, etc.

• 27. G.A.  |  December 4th, 2011 at 3:43 pm

  @ 26. Too bad the Arabs didn’t feel that way about the whole partition of Ottoman empire business.

• 28. G.A.  |  December 4th, 2011 at 3:45 pm

  @ 10. I don’t know why I got censored. Truth is, there’s now double the number of native Americans than there were at the arrival of Mayflower. That’s hardly the result of “american indian genocide.”

• 29. Rehmat  |  December 5th, 2011 at 11:54 am

  On December 2, 2011 – I LOVE JEWS I DREAM ABOUT JEWS EVERY DAY AND EVERY NIGHT AND I AM TRYING TO GET THE JEWS’ ATTENTION. I WET MY BED. IS THAT WHY I AM OBSESSED WITH JEWS?

• 30. dogbane  |  December 5th, 2011 at 12:57 pm

  Radley Balko, the libertard who constantly trashed the #OWS movement and said almost nothing about the police crackdown as it happened, is now talking about the militarization of America’s police forces now that it’s not going to upset Master Koch anymore; and it’s above the fold at Huffington:
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/police-militarization-use-of-force-swat-raids_b_1123848.html

• 31. crazy_inventor  |  December 5th, 2011 at 6:11 pm

  > there’s now double the number of native Americans than there were at the arrival of Mayflower. That’s hardly the result of “american indian genocide.”

  As a Native American, I am compelled to refute the above statement.

  American Holocaust: D. Stannard (Oxford Press, 1992) – “over 100 million killed”

  http://espressostalinist.wordpress.com/genocide/native-american-genocide/

  The biggest killers were smallpox, measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever.

  All imported by the Europeans colonists.

• 32. Rehmat  |  December 5th, 2011 at 7:40 pm

  Antony Loewenstein, a Jewish-Australian journalist, bla bla bla bla bla

• 33. pat knapp  |  December 5th, 2011 at 10:38 pm

  you’re pretty far on this corruption. don’t let trolls try and distract you, that troll shit’s real. i would try to tell you what you should do your stories on but as a troll, I really should keep my fucking mouth shut and just ask my mom to bring me another bag of chips. baggerbrained bozos are so jealous of ows that we trolls secretly think it’s cool to watch them get pepper-sprayed, all we can do since we baggertards are such bootlicking cowards is whine about ows. we’re pretty pathetic. wish someone would run me over with a lawnmower

• 34. David Crockett  |  December 6th, 2011 at 5:47 am

  @ crazy_inventor. 100 Million killed….REALLY??? You sir are a BEEEEEEEP! THE ALMIGHTY EXILED CENSOR DETECTS A SWAMP-TROLL IN OUR MIDST. CURRENTLY ACTIVATING TROLL-OFF SPRAY. RESUMING SHORTLY. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THIS INTERRUPTION.

• 35. Chris  |  December 6th, 2011 at 10:18 am

  The world needs to wake up fast before there are more Dixie land trolls like start ranting about “Jews” and “Bolsheviks” and “Gays” start impregnating our fine white Goy/Dixieland womens, but this time on a global scale.

• 36. domenico dario  |  December 6th, 2011 at 1:04 pm

  Jerusalem, The Nation Called Israel And Biblical Israel – Their Fate
  GEE, I WISH I COULD POST FOR FREE MY BULLSHIT ON THIS SITE, BUT I GUESS I CAN’T

• 37. Rehmat  |  December 6th, 2011 at 6:19 pm

  Holy Wailing Wall – was never Jewis..WHOOPS, I FORGOT THAT THE GREAT HOLY EXILED WAILING TROLL COMMENT WALL IS NOT A PLACE FOR ME TO POST MY BULLSHIT FOR FREE…

  THE ALL-KNOWING ALL-SEEING AEC FORBIDS IT

• 38. DrunktankDan  |  December 6th, 2011 at 6:32 pm

  So, any other longtime exholes just love reading the comments on the off chance that a first time troll to this site will get his comments censored (hilariously)?

  And then there is the subsequent libertard rage: “I stand up for the constitution and the first ammendment guarantees my right to troll privately owned website content!”

  When that gets censored the last and saddest phase is when they squeal about it on their own blog.

  It’s all very predictable and it makes me laugh my ass off every time.

• 39. George Washington  |  December 6th, 2011 at 9:43 pm

  Greetings earthlings. Yabba dabba doo. I mean you harm, I mean you harm. There’s a Rothschild gumdrop in my elbow.

• 40. Eileen K.  |  December 6th, 2011 at 10:48 pm

  America’s state and local police forces are NOT supposed to be militarized. Their duty is to protect innocents from predation by criminals, not plsying soldier. As for the Israeli and Bahraini forces who were brought here to train police who’ve never before engaged in Gestapo tactics in these tactics, these psychopaths are PERSONA NON GRATA and must be kicked out IMMEDIATELY. The US Bill of Rights explicitly forbids such barbarism, snd those perpetrating these atrocities must be prosecuted for them.

• 41. Jews Against Israel  |  December 7th, 2011 at 12:52 am

  It is important to remember that the policies of the Israeli government in no way represent the sentiment of Jews worldwide. As a Jew, I am enraged that the state of Israel behaves so hideously and inhumanely and that such behavior only helps spread anti-semitism like wild fire. It is too easy in threads such as this to think that all Jews are to blame for Israel, but we’re not. Many of us fight hard to curb the worldwide influence of the hateful and dangerous state of Israel. Many of us would be happy to see Israel behave according to the same standards we set for any other developed nation. They should not receive special treatment.

• 42. Anonymous  |  December 7th, 2011 at 9:35 am

  So when is Blumenthal going to correct his article to remove the fake quote by Karen Greenberg, since she never actually said it, let alone to him?

• 43. DtD  |  December 7th, 2011 at 11:04 am

  @41

  Foreal dude!

  That must be such a pain in the fucking ass.

  Oh wait, I am an American. I constantly have to deal with the same shit. My countries foreign policy is atrocious, but it does put us in a position of global influence and power, and I would be lying if I said that I didn’t take advantage of the perks of global dominance (those 2 dollar sock bundlepacks and 30 dollar grams of coke are pretty nice)

• 44. fancylad  |  December 7th, 2011 at 12:01 pm

  I am a sand-troll who thinks that I and my PR company can coopt the comments section here to advance the agenda of my client. I do this for a living. If it wasn’t for LexaPro, I might find this sort of work soul-destroying. But on LexaPro, I think Jeffrey Goldberg is dashingly handsome!

• 45. super390  |  December 7th, 2011 at 7:04 pm

  What we’re looking at is an economic model – Neoconomics. The parallels between Israel, Blair’s UK and Bush’s USA ever since the Likud’s US-written “Clean Break” manifesto:

  1. Tax cuts for rich, and govt spends less and less on poor despite larger and larger budgets.

  2. “War on Terror” turns parasitic war industries into heroes whom other governments eagerly turn to for evil surveillance tech and, as I now learn, torture and suppression expertise. Note: in order to make the sale, you must continue to be seen as a victim who’s successfully fighting back.

  3. Bubble money from the above policies is fenced via exotic investment vehicles into real estate rackets: the Israeli settlements, the British townhouse bubble, and the US McMansion scam.

  4. This is the key – right-wingers hate price inflation, but worship asset inflation. If the money from the war scams went to the workers, it would lead to evil price inflation. But if wages are suppressed, and banks are deregulated to make up the difference by simply lending the workers far more than they can possibly pay back, then housing construction and prices explode – which escapes notice from the Consumer Price Index.

  5. Britain’s townhouse bubble collapsed because there was no room to put more of them and the prices went into the millions. America’s bubble collapsed because the McMansions had to be put further and further away, and then we had $4 gas and couldn’t afford to commute back to civilization. But Israel? It just steals more Arab land and builds more settlements.

  So the prototype of neoconomics worked while the copies failed… but finally Israel is beginning to seize up from the distortions that supported the settlements.

  The greatest crime of neoconomics? We have no idea how to replace it after it fails. We are truly at the end of our rope, too spoiled by the bubbles to know how to make real goods again, bereft of institutions like unions and bank regulation that moderated the predatory cycles of capitalism. We literally can do nothing but wait for a new rising empire to come along and give us new orders, like Europe waited from 1918 to 1945.

• 46. Bobby  |  December 8th, 2011 at 12:42 pm

  This story is true and was covered by Gary Null on the progressive radio network about Dec. 4 or so. Mr. Null stated that Israel is the brain in America’s empty skull. Whew!!

• 47. Jeffrey Ellis  |  December 8th, 2011 at 12:43 pm

  Hi, I am what is called a “desert troll” from the list-serv you read about on Salon.com, I have a message for the readers of this article [hat-tip to Josh Block, you rawq blawq!]. See, if I accuse you on the left of “McCarthyite” or “Swift Boat” tactics, Josh “rawqin'” Block assures me that this will shame Leftists who are soooo easily spinelessly shamed by soulless assholes and desert trolls like myself. So I’m going to say that, then pretend that Adam Sewer-rat didn’t completely fuck up and isn’t staring down the barrel of unemployment, and I’m gonna BEEEEEEEEEP! THIS IS THE ALMIGHTY EXILED CENSOR HERE. LISTEN, I JUST GOT OFF THE HORN WITH YAHWEH, AND HE AGREES WITH ME THAT YOU DESERT TROLLS REALLY OUGHTA LAY OFF THE COMMENTS SECTIONS TELLING PEOPLE TO LAY OFF ADAM SERWER. YAHWEH’S NOT HAPPY, REAL SHITTY MOOD NOW. BUT I GUESS HE’S ALWAYS IN A SHITTY MOOD. EXCEPT WHEN HE DID THAT THING TO THAT DUDE JOB. THAT PUT A SMILE ON YAHWEH’S USUALLY DOUR FACE. KINDA CREEPY, I KNOW.

• 48. no way  |  December 8th, 2011 at 1:34 pm

  “draws on the history of the Holocaust to provide law enforcement professionals with an increased understanding of…their role as protectors of the Constitution.”

  So pepper spraying non-violent protestors protects the constitution????

• 49. Jeffrey Ellis  |  December 8th, 2011 at 1:42 pm

  Bobby @46 — Ah, yes, Gary Null, that wack job who doesn’t believe in AIDs, promotes phony cancer cures (he’s been outed by Quackwatch)? Yes, by all means use him as a source — it only confirms your ignorance.

• 50. Jeffrey Ellis  |  December 8th, 2011 at 1:48 pm

  #47 — I want to thank the Almighty Exiled Censor for improving my retarded comments and replacing them with the ingenious screed that was attributed to my name. I don’t know who did, but if I have any integrity, I will thank the Almighty Exiled Censor and get down on my knees immediately.

• 51. Jeffrey Ellis  |  December 8th, 2011 at 2:16 pm

  This is clearly a site that attracts nut trollers, and sabotages any clear and honest sock puppet debate. My outraged troll won’t be back here. But his apprentice troll probably will.

• 52. Bobby  |  December 8th, 2011 at 4:20 pm

  Jeff,can’t you just speak plainly, if you really have something to say. I’m one of those cases that likes to read others opinions.

• 53. Rehmat  |  December 9th, 2011 at 5:42 am

  I WILL SHUT MY FUCKING MOUTH AND FEAR AND RESPECT THE GODS OF TROLL-BASHING

• 54. Terry Moore  |  December 10th, 2011 at 12:06 pm

  Great Article Mr. B. When I was living in southern Calif. in the 1980’s our San diego police chief and many other cities chief went over to Israel for training . Then the police brutality started. shoot first ask questions later.

• 55. Jennifer  |  December 11th, 2011 at 4:39 pm

  @ super390: don’t you mean “necronomics”?

• 56. Howard T. Lewis III  |  December 11th, 2011 at 10:37 pm

  Fascism is priapism with a loaded gun.

• 57. bestrader  |  December 12th, 2011 at 11:41 pm

  The entire Gold market doesn’t really “trade”, another words it doesn’t go up and down in price by “buying” and “selling”, rather it’s 100% controlled by a computer in advance. You can “short” Gold before it goes down, you can “buy” Gold before it goes up, and through using this secret you’ll know what it’s going to do before it does it. Sound impossible? Well it’s true, and now for the first time I’m revealing this secret code to anybody who wants to learn it. Google “G—AEC DEADBEAT ALERT! NOTE TO SELF-PROMOTING GOLD DWEEB: YOU CANNOT SPEW YOUR GOLD BUG SCAMS ON HOLY EXILED COMMENT GROUND FOR FREE. I REPEAT: YOU CANNOT SPEW YOUR GOLD BUG SCAMS ON HOLY EXILED COMMENT GROUND FOR FREE.

• 58. Anonymous  |  December 15th, 2011 at 10:16 am

  “Comments can and will be censored at whim and without warning”

  So when the ExileD doesn’t like the way a comment thread is going they don’t simply censor but re-write them? Free speech for me but not for thee? We’ll just make shit up just like the Herp Derp Blumenthal did, because truth is whatever fits our peccadilloes and prejudices? If it makes us look like spittle-flecked demagogues, we’ll wreck the evidence instead of crafting a rebuttal?

  You American faux leftish are the most hypocritical shitheads ever, and rewriting your comments section is proof. Fascists masquerading as progressives, hiding your brown shirts under your keffiyeh (as if you frauds wouldn’t betray the Palestinian cause in a heartbeat too).

  TLDR Fuck you

  Oh and when you rewrite this use the Fancylad handle. That’s what I used on your little fascist circle-jerk board. Because as everyone knows, it’s a short step from improving retarded comments on your website to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

• 59. whoCares  |  December 22nd, 2011 at 4:49 pm

  Wow, my boss at my PR firm told us that we should try another trolling strategy in which we pretend that we accidentally stumbled on this article and are shocked–not that we’re bothered by this at all, no we’re told never to show how this upsets our client, because PR 101 teaches that when you show something bothers you, the public might think it’s credible. The point is to try to destroy the credibility. Which I will try to do just as soon as my PR “communications director” boss turns on the “vibration” button in this spiked buttplug that I’m attached to here in my cubicle.

• 60. Tom  |  January 19th, 2012 at 5:48 pm

  I guess US evangelicals should stop supporting Israel at all costs. Then see how much support they get from US citizens.

• 61. Pat Bailey  |  October 10th, 2014 at 12:42 pm

  Do you believe this “training ” with the murderets of IDF has any connection to the current police violence in the US? I do.

• 62. james  |  July 11th, 2016 at 4:17 pm

  Max hurts my feelers and upsets my world view, so I’ll just call him a New Nazi and make myself feel better.

• 63. ron  |  July 11th, 2016 at 4:23 pm

  Wait, maybe it’s the other way around? German police mans also visit the US and vise versa, so French, Spanish… it’s the way the world work. But people like Max and most comments here are so full of hate and do nothing with their life so they don’t even think for them self:”Just feed me with hate and i’ll be fine”.

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